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SPEAKER: A risk assessment is a systemic process of evaluating dangers that may occur when undertaking an organisational activity. A safeguarding risk assessment is one of the most useful tools to use when you want to prevent harm to people from occurring. It helps you think about all the possible harm that may occur to people who have direct or indirect contact with your organisation. The risk assessment includes several parts to it. Here, we have added seven parts, but you may want to add more depending on the context you’re working in. Think of risk to people. For example, you may be holding an event for young mothers, many of whom have suffered from sexual violence. The event will be supported by volunteers.

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You want to ensure that the young mothers and their children are safe during the activity from any form of further harm. Step two, likelihood. In the next column of the risk assessment, you want to assess the risk of harm occurring if you don’t put any measures in place. The score could be out of five. The more vulnerable the persons are that you’re working with, the higher the risk, which then means the higher the score. Step three, impact. In the next column, you’re going to gauge the impact of that harm on the persons involved in the activity. The greater the impact of harm, the higher the score. Step four, gross risk.

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In the next column, you would multiply the score that you gave the likelihood with the one in impact to give you the gross risk. Step five, mitigation. Here you’ll need to think about safeguarding measures that can be taken to mitigate or reduce the gross risk. The higher the gross risk, the more measures will need to be taken. For example, you could ensure that robust recruitment procedures are in place for the volunteers who will be involved in the activity in our example. You could ask candidates safeguarding questions during the interview, make background checks, verify the referees and the references provided, and do police checks to ensure that they don’t have any past criminal convictions. Step six, recalculate gross risk.

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If these mitigation measures are taken, have you lowered the likelihood and/or the impact? If so, put in new scores for likelihood and impact and recalculate your gross risk. Step seven, by whom, when? It’s important to add in who will take charge of the mitigation measures and when this will be done. Risk assessment should be completed with key stakeholders as a joint effort. Risk assessments are dynamic. They should be reviewed regularly to take into account change of circumstances. Risk assessments can be used for any organisational activity to prevent harm to your staff, representatives, and to people who benefit from your programmes.